Improved bounce test
- Improved members sorting
- Improved preview email to make it as close to proper email as possible
- Fixed duplicating already subscribed members when WP user registers
- Fixed incorrect URLs for sites with different home url then site url
- Other small improvements

June 18, 2013 - version 2.1.2

Fixed newsletter default title overwrite

Fixed missing translations

Fixed links in email body

Fixed problem with links when pretty permalinks are disabled

June 10, 2013 - version 2.1.1

Fixed problem with widget

June 7, 2013 - version 2.1

Added ability to send newsletter at certain time

Fixed CRON limits not working correctly

Improved POP3 under the hood settings detection for better compatibility

Added test button for SMTP configuration

Improved error reporting

Other small improvements

June 1, 2013 - version 2.0.4

Improved support for template background in various clients( tag now required in templates)

e-Newsletter brings professional newsletter creation and subscriber management to WordPress.

Think of all the money you’ll save when you drop your third-party email service.

Includes 7 professionally designed templates.

Simple Newsletter Creation

Use the familiar WordPress theme customizer to select an email template and layout content. See exactly what your message will look like before clicking send.

Select from one of the included 7 email templates to ensure a professional feel.

Layout amazing looking newsletters really fast.

Add a Personal Touch

Use data-builder tags to pull member data into your emails for personalizing newsletters.

Spice up your design with headers, background images and have full control over colors.

After you’ve done this for your first newsletter, you can simply clone it for subsequent newsletters to speed up the process even further!

Sending Newsletters

To send a newsletter just pick the relevant recipients, click send and track using the progress bar.

You can pre-configure whether to use SMTP (preferred) or PHPMail to send your newsletters and whether to send in the background.

Managing Subscribers

e-Newsletter provides an array of features for the management of your subscribers.

Subscribe forms can be embedded in your site using a widget or a shortcode. Collect just an email address, or configure to collect a first name and let subscribers select a subscriber group.

Take a more hands-on-approach and set a default group that all new subscribers automatically get added to and manually move subscribers between groups allowing you to segment your subscribers how you please.

e-Newsletter supports the recommended double opt-in method of subscribing and allows you to set-up a “welcome” email to be automatically sent to all new subscribers along with custom subscribe and unsubscribe pages.

To Install:

3. Upload the /e-newsletter/ folder and all its contents to the /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your site

4. Login to your admin panel for WordPress or Multisite and activate the plugin

Once installed and activated, you’ll see a new menu item in your admin area: eNewsletter.

Getting Set Up

The first thing you’ll want to do is configure your settings. Click the Settings sub-menu item.

There are 3 tabs that need your attention right away:

General Settings – your default settings.Outgoing Email Settings – how your newsletters are sent.Bounce Settings – how to handle the emails that get bounced back.

The General Settings are pretty straightforward. But to help you set things up under the Outgoing and Bounce Settings tabs, here are some handy links for default SMTP & POP settings if you’re using Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail:

If you are using your host’s webmail services, you can get the settings you need in cPanel. Go to “Add/Remove E-mail Account(s)”. Next to the email account you want the settings for, select “Configure Email Client” from the dropdown. You’ll find all the settings you need on the page that opens next.

Once you have your Outgoing and Bounce Settings configured, click the “Test Connection” button for each to be sure they work properly.

Next up: the User Permissions tab. Here, you can fine-tune the capabilities of any active user role on your site.

If you do not want any other users to have access to any settings, you can leave everything blank. You won’t see the Administrator role there, because it has all capabilities by default.

Creating a Newsletter

Now that you have everything configured in the settings, let’s go build a newsletter!

Click “Create Newsletter” in your eNewsletter menu. You will see the newsletter builder which uses the WordPress customizer feature to make your job real easy. It updates in real-time too!

Fully customizable templates with the WYSIWYG builder.

Simply select the template you wish to use, then fine-tune the email settings for this particular newsletter if you wish.

The WYSIWYG content editor should be very familiar. You can add any content you wish to your newsletter including links, images and.

The final settings allow you to add a background image and adjust the color scheme if you want to.

Reporting and Other Features

Now that you have a newsletter created, and some data to report, let’s take a look at how you can view that data. Click “Reports” in the eNewsletter menu.

There you will see all the data associated with the 5 most recent newsletters and the 5 most recent members. This includes info like how many newsletters were sent, to how many members, in which groups, how many were opened and how many were bounced. Cool huh?

Now click “Newsletters” in the eNewsletter menu. That screen shows info about all the newsletters that have been sent or simply created. Simply click column headers to sort the display by date created, subject or template.

Sending Newsletters

When you’re ready to send a newsletter, simply click the “Send” button next to the newsletter you want to send (you can do so from either the Reports screen, or the Newsletters screen). On the next screen, specify who the newsletter should be sent to and set your filtering and scheduling preferences.

1. Send to all subscribers.2. Send to subscribers of selected groups.3. Send to subscribers on selected Membership Access Levels.4. Send to subscribers with specified user roles.5. Send to all network admins.6. Set filtering options.7. Set your scheduling preference.

You can target 5 specific types of subscribers who should receive your newsletter:

All active members

Selected newsletter groups

Subscribers on selected Membership access levels

Subscribers with specific WordPress user roles

Admins of all network sites

Selecting All Active Members will send your newsletter to everyone who has subscribed to every group.

eNewsletter Groups enables you to send only to subscribers of selected groups.

The Membership Plugin Levels option will only appear if you have our Membership plugin active on your site. Here, you can select to send your newsletter to subscribers on specific Membership Access Levels.

Select any WordPress User Roles to send the newsletter to all subscribers with those selected roles on your site.

Ticking the Admins of All Sites checkbox will send your newsletter to, you got it, all subsite admins in your network. Note that this option will send your newsletter to all subsite admins whether they are subscribed or not.

You can choose to filter the users who should receive your newsletter so those who have already received it don’t get it again. You can also select to re-send a newsletter only to selected users whose previous sending got bounced back.

Finally, you have 3 options to send your newsletter:

Click the big blue Send newsletter now button to send it immediately to everyone you had selected above.

Click the Send in background button to let WordPress take care of it via CRON while you tend to other business.

Click the Edit link to open the form where you can schedule your newsletter for a specific date and time.

Group Mailing Lists

Oh yeah… did we mention groups? Let’s take a look at that now. Go to “Member Groups” in the eNewsletter menu.

There, you can create as many groups as you need or want. Member groups are basically mailing lists that your users can subscribe to.

Once users have signed up for group newsletters, you can view and edit that information on the Members page. Click “Members” in the eNewsletter menu to view that now.

Managing Members

On the Members screen, you’ll find all the information you need about how many newsletters were sent to each member, how many were opened or bounced and which groups they are subscribed to.

You can sort the display by clicking any column header, and filter to show only certain categories using the “Show…” buttons.

You can even filter the display to show only the data pertaining to a specific newsletter by clicking on the newsletter name in the “Groups” column.

Click the “Change Groups” button in the Actions column for any user to instantly add or remove them from any groups you like. To help you find the users you’re looking for, there’s even a handy search form that will search any text string. For example, to find all users with a gmail address, simply enter gmail in the search box. Click: instant custom sorting!

You can also edit member’s email addresses and names simply by clicking the Edit button in the Actions column. Very handy for those members who change addresses or want your newsletters sent to an alternate address.

You’ll also notice buttons at the top that say “Show the New Member / Import forms” and “Show the export Members form”. Clicking them will open the forms that enable you to create new members, add them from a CSV file or export selected groups to a CSV file.

When importing a member list, the contents of your CSV file should look like the following (note that file should not have headers).

Getting Users to Subscribe

How do your users subscribe to your newsletter groups, you ask? You’ll find a new widget under “Appearance” > “Widgets” that you can add to any sidebar you like.

Depending on your theme, it could look like this on the front-end when users are logged-in. Of course, not-logged-in visitors will need to enter their email address and, optionally their name.

You can also use a shortcode to include the subscription form wherever you need it.

[enewsletter_subscribe]

The shortcode has 3 parameters that you can customize.

show_name enables/disables the “Name” field in the form for site visitors.

show_groups enables/disables the group selection for site visitors.

subscribe_to_groups auto-subscribes users to the groups specified by ID.

For example, the shortcode configured as follows would hide the group selection checkboxes, automatically subscribe the user to groups with the specified IDs, and ask for the visitor’s name.

Use the shortcode to add the subscription form to any post or page content, or even include it in custom page templates using the do_shortcode function.

Using Custom Themes

Yes! You can make your own custom newsletter themes. Simply copy an existing theme from the following folder:

e-newsletter/email-newsletter-files/templates

Change the name of the copied theme folder to any name you like. Then open the style.css file inside your new theme, and change the Theme Name to the same new name. Now you have your own theme that you can customize to your heart’s content.

Once you are done customizing, you’ll need to upload your newsletter theme to your site. You can use either FTP for this, or the File Manager feature at your host’s cPanel or Plesk.

To prevent overwriting your custom themes when you update the plugin, e-Newsletter creates a special folder for them when you activate the plugin.

You’ll find the enewsletter-custom-themes folder in wp-content/uploads(+/siteID/ if activated on a single blog of a multi-site install).

Once you have added your custom themes to that folder, they will be available for selection in the templates area when you create or edit a newsletter.

Additional Customization Options

Yup, there’s more! You can use following data-builder tags (macros) in either the newsletter builder or your custom theme templates.

{FIRST_NAME} displays the user’s WordPress first name in the newsletter

{USER_NAME} displays the user’s WordPress username in the newsletter

{TO_EMAIL} displays the email address the newsletter was sent to

{VIEW_LINK} displays the link to view the newsletter in a browser

{DATE} displays the date the newsletter was sent

For example, you could add them to the content area of the newsletter builder:

And your users would see that information displayed in the newsletter they receive:

We hope you’ll have fun managing your email campaigns with e-Newsletter! If you run into any snags, just head on over to the forums. Our stellar support team (and members!) are standing by to help you get things up and running smoothly.

e-Newsletter Features

e-Newsletter has all the features you need to build and maintain a successful email newsletter for your website.

7 professional email templates

Live preview of your email as you build it

Keep constant design by cloning previous emails

Segment your subscribers by creating unlimited groups

Define a default group for new subscribers

Send newsletters to all subscribers, a group or a specific WordPress role